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Aucbvax.2167 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Wed Jul 8 02:41:34 1981 Re: A Quibble or two >From Joe.Newcomer@CMU-10A Wed Jul 8 02:34:48 1981 I see nothing unreasonable about entering something in the computer "for someone in the same office"; I don't see that spatial proximity should require using an alternate method of notification, assuming that the mechanism is already satisfactory. If using little pieces of paper is more effective than using the computer, this indicates that something is very wrong in the design of the software. Either the software is good enough to replace paper, which is presumably the intent, or somebody blew the design. Thus, we have a very good way of determining if the designers built a system tailored to human needs, or one which is simply intended as an ego trip for the designer.

I still don't understand why people seem to think "rings" or "stacks" or other complex connected graphs are remotely reasonable for representing past context. The top of my desk has no little strings connecting all the things I'm doing, and I don't miss them; if I have to deal with such a mechanism on my computer, then somebody who wrote the software doesn't understand how people do work. See above predicate test.

A more serious problem is, given massive amounts of state, how do you preserve them over a system crash? In the case of distributed systems, it is even harder, since the state may be embodied in many (potentially unreliable) separate machines. In the best of all possible worlds, when my personal workstation rolls in the door, I turn it on. If I turn it off, the result of turning it back on should be to put me back in the state I was in when I turned it off. Likewise for system crashes. If some server somewhere crashes, this should be of no interest to me, even if I'm using it; when it comes back, my work continues just where it left off. None of this is easy, and some of it is probably impossible, but I think it is important enough that we should be concerned about reliability at a level above parity and disk scavengers. joe

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